More than 14,000 Hoosiers on electronic monitoring, data shows

New information gathered over the past two years is providing Indiana officials with better insights into the use of electronic monitoring for those awaiting trial and others sentenced to house arrest.

Statewide data compiled by the Indiana Justice Reinvestment Advisory Council, or JRAC, shows more than 14,000 Hoosier adults on average were under electronic monitoring supervision in Indiana every quarter in 2024. In 2023, when supervising agencies across the state were first required to report electronic monitoring statistics, the four-quarter average was more than 15,000.

State Rep. Wendy McNamara, R-Evansville, said that by collecting data, policymakers and judges will be able to make better decisions about who should be on electronic monitoring and the costs associated with it.

“Are we putting the right people out there in our communities, or are there certain people with certain consistent crimes that should not be allowed to have electronic monitoring?” McNamara asked.

In 2024, alleged crimes against a person—including battery, kidnapping, robbery and sex crimes—accounted for the most pre-trial adults on electronic monitoring at 41%. Crimes related to controlled substances ranked second at 19%.

After the cases have been resolved, the ranking reverses with crimes related to controlled substances accounting for 30% of monitored adults and with crimes against a person at 22%.

“We’re always better legislators when we have the right amount of data in front of us, and I think this will give us that opportunity,” McNamara said.

Before the enactment of legislation in 2022 requiring data collection, the state had no data.

The new law established new electronic monitoring standards for the state, including requiring agencies to collect data on the number of individuals tracked on electronic monitoring devices, the types of offenders on monitoring, the number of false location alerts and the percentage of device malfunctions.

This year, policymakers fine-tuned that legislation, addressing local agency requirements for collecting and supplementing electronic monitoring data to their local JRAC – an advisory council charged with conducting reviews of corrections programs, county jails and probation services and more.

Among the changes, the law now states that agencies are no longer required to report the number of false location alerts.

“The end goal was to make it simpler for the folks in the field who are running the program,” said Sen. Brett Clark, R-Avon, who authored Senate Enrolled Act 218.

Clark, a recently elected senator and former sheriff, said he took on the legislation to gain legislative experience and to assist those at JRAC who juggle many responsibilities.

“It’s something that I knew about with the JRAC, so I wanted to help them, and we were able to get it done,” Clark said.

Kevin Mulroony, director of Hamilton County Community Corrections, told The Indiana Lawyer this year’s legislation alleviated some of the agency’s workload.

He said the initial legislation “really caused community corrections agencies across the state to take on a whole lot of extra work.”

The costs

One important dataset to observe from the new reports is the costs levied and collected, McNamara said.

“Prior to 2023, some of the charges for these contractors on electronic monitoring were absolutely outrageous, and your local communities were paying a substantial amount of money for this monitoring,” McNamara said. “So, there’s also the total cost and fees that are going to be levied and collected; that’s going to be looked at.”

For calendar year 2023, JRAC reported that electronic monitoring fees typically charged to offenders averaged $9.6 million a quarter. In 2024, the fees averaged $9.9 million a quarter.

The four-quarter average for electronic monitoring fees collected in 2023 was $7.3 million, and the average in 2024 was $7.6 million.

According to JRAC, fees are typically set by the supervising agency. The fees are determined after agencies evaluate the actual cost for vendor services, staffing costs, overhead expenses, cost of providing indigent services, overall collection rates and the type of program or equipment being utilized. These reported fees can include daily monitoring fees, transfer fees, equipment damage/replacement fees and installation fees.

Scott Hohl, executive director of Marion County Community Corrections, emphasized that Indiana communities must budget carefully to make sure they meet all the reporting and monitoring requirements of state law.

Recent budgetary decisions have involved the increasing transition to GPS monitoring devices, Mulroony said.

“The biggest concern that we have, as far as an agency, is the cost associated with GPS monitoring,” Mulroony said. “Our costs associated with electronic monitoring have more than doubled over the past couple of years because we had to transition to a whole new type of equipment.”

Mulroony said that since Hamilton County doesn’t manufacture its own devices or build its monitoring software, it has a monitoring agreement with a third-party contractor.

“Most monitoring companies charge more for GPS monitoring, as their costs to operate the devices are higher,” Mulroony said, “And the devices are significantly more expensive to maintain.”

The devices

There are generally three kinds of monitoring devices used in Indiana: GPS monitors, Radio Frequency (RF) monitors and Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitors. The former two are most commonly used for those on house arrest.

GPS monitors track the location and movement of the wearer by GPS satellites, cellular towers and/or Wi-Fi. RF monitors ensure the wearer remains in a specified location through the use of a transmitter and a receiver.

“This type of equipment responds differently to different environmental conditions, and based on the electronic monitoring standards, there’s certain things that our staff are required to do,” Mulroony said. “If we lose a GPS signal, we have to determine: is it environmental, or what’s causing that to be an issue? And that happens 24 hours a day. So, we have staff who are responding to these 24 hours a day, which incurs overtime costs.”

According to the JRAC 2024 annual report, about 6% of electronic monitoring devices malfunctioned for the supervised adult population per quarter. For 2023, it was about 5% a quarter.

The new electronic monitoring standards didn’t just introduce data collection requirements. State law also imposed new measures to verify the location of tracked individuals in the event their monitoring device goes offline for unexplained reasons, and it also established notification timeframes for when a tracked person disables or interferes with their device or violates their exclusion zones.

Now under the law, employees of supervising agencies, like Community Corrections, are required to notify their supervisor within 15 minutes of a serious incident involving a violent offender—like if a monitoring device suffers an unexplained or undocumented loss of communication, a tracked person enters a prohibited exclusion zone or if the tracked person interferes with the monitoring device.

And, if the tracked person has been charged or convicted of a crime against a vulnerable victim, the agency must also notify the victim and request law enforcement to conduct a welfare check.

A step in the right direction

Kerry Hyatt Bennett, chief legal counsel for the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence, told The Indiana Lawyer in an email that the coalition supports the new requirement, citing the rapid notification to victims and law enforcement as empowering survivors to activate their safety plans and seek immediate support.

“While this is only one tool in preventing serious harm or death, it represents an important and necessary step forward in protecting victims,” Bennett said.

Bennett said she’s confident the law offers additional protections for victims, but it’s only part of the most effective response.

“We believe this is great work, but we know that what survivors want varies,” Bennett said in her email. “Some want an aggressive criminal justice response, but some are terrified that such a response will put them in greater danger (because it often does). Some survivors just want to be believed and receive the support they need to regain their autonomy. Some survivors need housing or temporary financial support. What survivors want varies because every survivor is different.”

A thoughtful, systemic response to domestic violence doesn’t focus only on criminal justice issues, Bennett continued.

“It is also about supporting the non-offending survivor of abuse to get away and stay away from the abuser,” Bennett said. “It’s about providing that survivor with legal assistance at no cost to themselves to ‘even out the playing field’; it’s about providing that survivor with temporary stable basics absent the person that has likely been controlling them as a form of abuse. And it is also about not penalizing them with allegations of abuse or neglect when they were the victims of domestic violence.”

Mulroony emphasized that he believes the changes to electronic monitoring standards were, for the most part, beneficial.

“I think that setting those specific victim notification requirements, and having different timelines for individuals if they’re violent offenders versus non-violent offenders, I mean, I think that stuff all goes a long way to helping ease the mind of victims who never asked to be put in their situation,” Mulroony said. “That was a major step in the right direction, from a victim advocacy standpoint.”•